Alchemy for Beginners
So, you're new here, and want to know what to do? Well, I've got your back. Sign up for the wiki The very first thing is to make an account on the wiki. To do that, go to the top right, and click where it says register. Then fill out the form, and go through the process. Keep in mind, your username does not need to be the name of your character, and is even discouraged. Instead, try to come up with something interesting, or use a name you use for a different service, such as email or xbox live. When you are registered for the wiki, move on to the next step. Getting Registered Next is to get claimed. You will need a rough description of you character, and what your character is. Is he an alchemist? A normal soldier good with guns, fists or anything of the liking? To get started, try filling out this outline: Name: Gender: Rank: History: Alchemy/Weapons: If you can fill that out completely, with at least a paragraph for a history (keep in mind, more is better), you are ready to move on. Fleshing it out You will be more likely to be registered if you can further expand upon your character and make him/her more detailed. You could talk about their personality, their alchemy/how they fight, appearance, etc. For appearance, make sure to include things like height, hair and eye color, and age. The history should makes sense, and not including any characters from the book. Try to include how they learned alchemy/weapon use, how they grew up and raised and how they entered the Miltary. Now try filling the following out: Name: Gender: Rank: Appearance: Personality: History: Weapons: If you can do that, you are ready to be registered. Go to the Registration page, and follow the instructions, then click the button for registering, and fill it out. Dont forget to put your signature at the end! (you can do that by clicking the signature button, or by typing ~~~~) Check back later see if it has been approved. If it has, you are ready to move on! If not, fix the indicated things, and put something at the end of the page to the effect of "I fixed it", and put ~~~~ at the end, to sign it. Your character page After your registration is accepted, you should start on a page for your character. Go to do just that. For the Article title, put in the name of your character. Make sure you spell it correctly, as if you mess up, you will need an admin to fix it for you! Fill the page with what you wrote in your registration. To make a character template you need to put this on Source mode and fill it with your character info: Adding the info Now you need to add the info for your character. Below the stuff I had you copy in, put in your characters information. A good rule of thumb is to break it up into sections: one for your appearance, one for your history, one for your personality, and one for your stuff. The easiest way to make one of these sections is to use a title format. So what you do is type what you want the title to be, for our example, lets say "Appearance". Then highlight the text (double click the word) and look towards the top of the screen, on the left. You should see a box, that says normal. Click that. A menu should appear. Click "Heading 2". Done! If you're on Source mode, use two = to make the same Heading. Now fill out the relevant information for that section below the heading, and repeat when you get to your next section. You are now almost done with your character page. Just one last step! Getting an image In the above template, you may have noticed one bit called "image", to which you no doubt thought, "but I don't have an image!" Well never fear, friend, because I have a way to help. If you already have the image you want, there is a button below the "Recent Wiki Activity" that says "Upload Image". Click there and choose the image you have saved. Look at the name, and make sure you remember it. Now go back to the image bit of the form up above, and put in that exact name, including the .png, .jpg, or whatever. Now click Publish, at the bottom. You're done! If you don't have any images, you can find good pictures on deviantart. Just make sure that no one else is using that picture before you put it on your character's page. Real life pictures aren't allowed since we're basing this off a manga/anime and it would look weird. Anime or drawed pictures are best, but if you really want real life pictures, ask an so they decide what to do. Ranks The ranks can confuse you, but to make sure you don't put the wrong rank, I'll explain them to you: State Alchemists: Major Normal Soldiers: Private All characters begin with those ranks. Depending on how good they are being to the state, they can climb ranks (check this page to see what the ranks you can go higher are). Just because you're a normal soldier doesn't mean you can't get on a general rank or things alike. You need to deserve those and if you don't, you're staying on your own rank. Getting a Word Bubble Word Bubbles are little speech bubbles the people use when they want to indicate that their character is saying something, as opposed to them. For instance, my main character Mei's Word Bubble looks like this: Which is, in turn, really this, before it is filled out: To add the time and message in place of the and }, you would write it like this: Now, if you want to know what that all means, I'll explain. the } on the unfilled template. The 5 ~'s will insert the date and time, so you don't have to. Next comes another | , meaning we are now moving to the second 'variable', the }. That is the message bit. So that is where you write the message. So, the filled out one I posted above would look like this: So at this point, I'm sure you want to know how to get your own! So now you will go back to the and make the template. To make the template, make the article title Template:FirstName, obviously replacing FirstName with your character's first name. Then paste the following code in: } |text = } }} Make sure to leave the } and } there, as it makes the code work right. For the colors, you can use words, such as darkblue, or a hex color generator. Save the page, and use as indicated. If you want to use the hexadecimal code for the colours, which gives you a wider variety of colours to use, here is a colour picker to help you. Colour-Picker Start Roleplaying Now comes the fun part, the Roleplaying (RPing)! Now, this is a less traditional RP setup than other places, and most RP takes place character-to-character, on the characters' pages, like you made. This is where the word bubbles come into play, as well. When you first get your page set-up, you will soon get Welcomes from people, at the bottom of your character page, in the comments. Pick one of these people that you think you might want to reply to, and click on the reply button. You've just started your first roleplay! Have fun, and if you have any questions, join the chat by clicking on the link on the right. Just be aware that the chat is OOC, or out of character. That means that you don't RP your character in the chat. In chat, you're just a normal human being sitting behind a computer.